Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Importance of Breast Cancer Awareness Ties

When we want to draw attention to something that we care about, even things that we might have a deep personal connection to, we often have a hard time actually feeling like we are contributing to that movement, to the cause that we really have deep feelings about - and it can make people feel really bad about a perceived inability to effect change. However, there's a very simple way to draw attention to a cause - by using clothing choices to send a message about what is most important.

One of the causes that are extremely common for people to take up (which does not lessen its impact or importance in the least) is breast cancer awareness. When people discuss cancer, even with all the awareness campaigns, breast cancer is often pushed aside in favor of the cancers that some people see as more threatening, when massive numbers of people are afflicted with breast caner everyday who the marginalization does not help at all, and if it does do anything, it hurts them. In fact, breast cancer is not limited to women; men, too, are stricken by this killer, and as with any disease, the whole family is affected.

Thankfully, the movement is easy to recognize and therefore simple to identify as a part of, having adopted the color pink for the entire movement, as well as a traditional ribbon. Indeed, the two are often combined into the pink ribbon to represent all the people that have been lost to breast cancer, those who are engaged in battling the disease right now and the hope for a cure.

The exact form this symbol takes can differ wildly thanks to the different styles that different people have, but there are some common elements that can really help bring any sort of outfit together - and for men, that's a tie. Usually, when men wear some sort of nice clothing, the piece de resistance, the finishing touch is a tie, and there is no better way to express support of breast cancer awareness day-to-day without having to compromise existing style.

Indeed, one might expect a tie themed around the color pink to be a bit garish and over the top, but these ties actually tend to be quite subdued, for the exact reason that if they were garish no one would bother to wear them on a regular basis.

Perhaps the biggest advantage that breast cancer awareness ties have over other pieces of clothing, though, is that there is an entire culture that has sprung up around admiration and reverence for ties. When someone wears a tie that someone else doesn't understand, they ask about it, and the best thing that breast cancer awareness ties can really hope to achieve is to start conversations about breast cancer.

Really, that is the goal of any sort of awareness-based clothing. There's no real expectation that seeing someone else wearing a piece of clothing is going to change someone's mind about the subject of it, or even make them aware of it, but it serves to spark a conversation in which the person wearing the clothing can hopefully do a great job of convincing the person that we are all touched by this disease.